E-resilience Monitoring Toolkit Methodological Notes and Pilot Countries’ Profiles

The on-going pandemic of COVID-19 has shown the great extent with which we rely upon the digital services to sustain our normal existence.

The same services during the time of need can transform into a source of innovation and hope, and become powerful tools to manage hazard and exposure. While there is a little doubt that our recovery effort success with leaving no one behind will depend on the reliable, high quality, accessible and affordable digital services and the underlying ICTs.

This is why the cooperation strengthening regional e-resilience, which includes using ICTs as tools during crises and ICTs own resilience, is critically important and could not come at the better time.

By putting robust and scalable measurement as a first step, ESCAP secretariat is writing in hopes to expand the options available to the Member States. The toolkit should become useful in policy deliberations of the regional economic groups, as well as facilitate a greater regional cooperation and dialogue on practical steps to address e-resilience.

This paper aims to establish baseline methodology and a point for further discussions driven by the membership.

In particular, the paper desribes process of initial e-resilience data collection, techniques used to transform the data into a single dataset, operations with data, such as missing values treatment and normalization, and visualization of the data.

The dataset for the several pilot country are already available online for all members as the ESCAP web resource.

To show the potential of this tool, based on the dataset published in the form of an online visually appealing dashboard, we put together several pilot country profiles with specific policy recommendations.

Hopes are high for decisive actions in the upcoming decade – the last before the end of the current Sustainable Development Goals agenda and the first for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as the ESCAP initiative on Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway (AP-IS) 2022-2026 Action Plan.

Data-driven and smart action is needed more than ever. Resilience of the digital requires strong policy response, and ESCAP is ready to assist Member States in reaching their objectives in line with the vision of prosperous, safe, resilient, and digital, Asia-Pacific.

For the full report, please visit here.

For the Russian version, please click here.